Enemy of our enemy

It’s fun to watch the Obama Administration chomping at the bit to provide air support for savages when you remember that the BIG liberal knock on Republican foreign policy, at least since the Reagan era, has been the necessity of propping up useful bad guys. How dare we support a brutal kleptocrat like Hosni Mubarak, just because he’s amenable to crucial American interests! No wonder the world hates us – we supported bad people during the Cold War, just because they were enemies of the even worse communists!

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But suddenly the need to blindly support Barack Obama has turned the entire Democrat Party into a mob of Henry Kissinger clones, and produced the spectacle of John Kerry, “Winter Soldier” icon, blatantly lying about the Syrian rebels. Suddenly people who torture enemy troops, and inconvenient civilians, in a manner reminiscent of Jenjiss Khan areawesome.

No one outside the Administration’s political apparatus seriously thinks the “secular, moderate” faction is ascendant. That’s the big reason Obama’s plans to arm the rebels have been put on indefinite hold: he’s (justifiably) nervous that American weapons would end up in al-Qaeda hands.

Unfortunately, while Obama has led the Left to embrace realpolitik and the necessity of supporting the enemy of our enemies, even when they’re dodgy characters, they missed the part about doing so only when vital American interests are at stake. But then, much of Obama’s foreign policy is driven by the apparent conviction that supporting anti-American factions in regional conflicts will burnish his credentials as First Citizen of the World, and persuade hostile populations that Obama’s New America is totally different than the Old America they truly hate.